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Church is like our widowed mother, pope says

The Catholic church is like the widowed mother of Nain in today’s Gospel from Luke, Pope Francis tells us. According to Vatican Radio, the pope sees the church as a mother who protects her children so that she can bring them to Jesus, just as the woman from Nain brought to him her son who had died. He goes on to call her “an icon of the church, because the church is in a sense widow.”

Continuing with a favorite theme of his, Francis says that as a “mommy,” the church must cry for its people.

“She is a church that, when she is faithful, knows how to cry,” he says. “When the church does not cry, something is not right. She weeps for her children, and prays. A church that goes forward and does rear her children, gives them strength and accompanies them until the final farewell in order to leave them in the hands of her spouse, who at the end will come to encounter her.”

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